This August, we have a 5-part series written by Laura Fisher exploring how bicycles are used as a dissident object in contemporary art. The first post looked at the importance and impact of one of Ai Weiwei’s most iconic bicycle-based artworks ‘Forever’. In this second instalment, Laura looks at the refashioned (literally) ‘reversed engineered’ bike project entitled Returnity by German art duo Elin Wikström and Anna Brag. Enjoy! NG.
While Ai’s bicycles are polished and quiescent, many other artists have employed the bicycle’s movement to activate different kinds of individual and social behaviour. For example, in 1997, as part of the Skulptur Projecte in Münster, Germany, artists Elin Wikström and Anna Brag staged an event called Returnity.
They engineered nine bicycles to travel backwards when they were pedalled forwards, and equipped them with training wheels and a rear-view mirror.
A bicycle club was set up in a public park for three months, providing instructions to members of the public who attempted to ride the altered bicycles. In the end, over 2,000 people participated with about a quarter of these returning again and again to improve their skills.
These bicycles were a prop for heightening people’s spatial and sensory awareness. They also created an unusual social space. As Maria Lind remarked, it “was a playful test that referenced lifelong learning [and] connectivity in a globalised world” and an exercise in “radically rethinking and deliberately disorienting one’s naturalised behaviours”
Lind’s comments about Returnity are a reminder that the bicycle’s humility as a human scaled machine paradoxically gives it great power. Not only is it open to inexhaustible experimentation, it can engage the body and mind in such a way as to galvanise both personal autonomy and social affinity.
Laura Fisher is a post-doctoral research fellow at Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney. In October 2015 she co-curated Bespoke City with Sabrina Sokalik at UNSW Art & Design, a one night exhibition featuring over 20 practitioners celebrating the bicycle through interactive installations, sculpture, video, design innovation, fashion and craft. This event was part of Veloscape, an ongoing art–research project exploring the emotional and sensory dimensions of cycling in Sydney.
The contents of this post was written by Laura Fisher and first published online by Artlink (2015). Minor edits and hyperlinks added and footnotes removed to aid short-form continuity. Images from Artlink unless attributed.